Last year, Bill Thom won the first Munsey Award, given “to a deserving person who has given of himself or herself for the betterment of the pulp community, be it through disseminating knowledge about the pulps or through publishing or other efforts to preserve and to foster interest in the pulp magazines we all love and enjoy” for his hard work on Coming Attractions, an indispensable resource on Pulp-related news that I peruse each week and where I found dozens of news items to announce on The Cimmerian these last six months. This year, essayist (and Cimmerian journal-contributor) Don Herron is nominated.  Don Herron authored several seminal pieces on Robert E. Howard –you can read Brian Murphy’s appreciation of Don’s “milestones in Howard studies” here on the Cimmerian blog.

Besides his literary criticism about the Bard of Cross Plains, Don Herron is also an authority on Dashiell Hammett, Charles Willeford, Philip K. Dick and the Emperor of Dreams, Clark Ashton Smith. He created the Dashiell Hammet Tour in 1977 and has lead Hammett aficionados through San Francisco every year since then.

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TC editors advertising (I refuse to use the term “pimping”) their personal literary items for sale has a long history here on the blog.  Check out this post by Leo Grin (and several subsequent).

Times are dire here in serpent-haunted SEK. Musing on such, a decision was reached by yours truly. Time to lighten the load for the journey into the future.

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Since he seems to be too humble to mention it himself here, I will do it for him; our own Cimmerian blogger William Patrick Maynard has announced that he has fully-executed agreement from the Sax Rohmer Literary Estate to write a second novel featuring Rohmer’s evil doctor. It will be entitled The Destiny of Fu Manchu.

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Having sent in postings on Uther and some other Arthurian characters — and written stories based on the King Arthur mythos myself — I’d like to pay tribute to the sources that did most to make me an addict of those very legends. The fascination began when I was just a kid, with the classic Howard Pyle’s King Arthur and His Knights, the now legendary (in itself) comic strip Prince Valiant, which among other distinctions showed here and there that it owed something to Lord Dunsany, and continued into my teens when I discovered, and read over and over, Le Morte d’Arthur by Malory.

There was Edison Marshal’s excellent The Pagan King.

And there was, unforgettably, Rosemary Sutcliff. She wrote some fantasy, retelling famous legends (Beowulf’s story in Dragon Slayer, Cuchulainn’s and Finn’s in The Hound of Ulster and The High Deeds of Finn mac Cool). She also dealt with Arthurian legend in a number of books. The Light Beyond the Forest retells the search for the Holy Grail by Lancelot, Galahad, Bors and Perceval. The Sword and the Circle recounts Arthur’s birth, youth and early years as king. The Road to Camlann tells with a steadily darkening tone the treachery of Mordred, the breach between Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere, and the final battle.

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“Andaman—Second!” was the seventh installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial, Fu-Manchu first published in THE STORY-TELLER in April 1913. The story would later comprise Chapters 18-20 of the novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (re-titled The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu for U.S. publication). Rohmer returned the series to its Holmesian roots by mining Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” for inspiration. Conan Doyle’s case concerns stolen submarine plans taken from Cadogan West while Rohmer’s story involves stolen aero-torpedo plans taken from Norris West. “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” was published in 1912, just a few months before Rohmer wrote “Andaman—Second!” and shows that Sherlock Holmes was still very much a model for the Fu-Manchu series at this early stage. (Continue reading this post)

Three blockbuster years, and The Cimmerian Blog was gaining its own momentum as a scholarly entity apart from the esteemed journal which spawned it: with the TC journal entering its final volume and two crises jeopardizing its continuing existence, the blog was going to either spreads its wings, or dwindle into some blood-hued, blogospheric sunset.

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The echoes of Robert E. Howard’s life can be found in the places where he best lived it–in his copious amount of fiction and verse. And while that is a good place to start forming a complete picture of Howard, eventually the Lone Star State will rear its ungainly head and bellow, “Well, what about me?” You can always take the man out of Texas, but it’s impossible to take Texas out of the man.
 
–Mark Finn, Blood and Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard

It’s hard for me to compare Mark Finn’s Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard, with any other biography of Howard, for the simple fact that it was the first full-length treatment of Howard’s life that I’ve read. But over the years I had picked up a lot of detritus on the life of the man who brought us larger than life, pulp heroes like Conan of Cimmeria and Solomon Kane, gathering enough scattered bits of information to form what I thought was a pretty accurate picture of one of my favorite writers: Immensely talented, yet socially malajusted, overly dependent on his mother, with paranoid and schizophrenic tendencies.

Fortunately, Finn has set the record straight on Howard’s character and personality with Blood & Thunder, presenting an alternative view that brings Howard into focus as a colorful and misunderstood young man who took his own life largely due to circumstances beyond his control. Finn admittedly wrote his book as a counterpoint to the only other full-length biography of Howard, L. Sprague de Camp’s Dark Valley Destiny, which according to Finn is responsible for many of the inaccurate myths surrounding Howard’s life. “I tried to think of everything that I didn’t like about de Camp’s effort, and then I tried very hard not to do that,” writes Finn. This is both admirable and, in a few places, limiting.

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I announced REHupan Charles Allen Gramlich‘s upcoming Heroic Fantasy/Sword-and-Sorcery collection Bitter Steel last January here on The Cimmerian. It just came out this week and is now available through Amazon.

Here’s the back cover blurb for the book:

Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Achilles, Beowulf! Kull, Conan, Kane!

Heroes are born, but they never die. They become legends; they become myths. Bitter Steel is a collection of new myths, new heroic adventures told in the ancient tradition.

So come! Gather with me around the fire where the smoke stings our eyes. We’ll listen to the drums beat in time with our hearts. We’ll drink from the common bowl as it passes among us. The darkness whispers outside our camp, but we have no fear. There are heroes among us. Let us hear their tales.

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A couple weeks ago I reviewed R. J. Myers’ The Cross of Frankenstein. It was the respected political commentator’s first foray into fiction. He followed it with a sequel, 1976’s The Slave of Frankenstein and despite the promise of a third book, his only other genre efforts were a late seventies soft-core vampire title and a privately-published guide to blood-drinking as an alternative lifestyle. I always feel a pang of guilt when I come down hard on a fellow pastiche writer. I’ve been on the receiving end of disappointed Sax Rohmer and Conan Doyle fans who felt I had no business continuing the adventures of characters they love. At the same time, I believe I have been fair and honest in my assessments when reviewing pastiches. I have the utmost respect for Joe Gores, Michael Hardwick, Cay Van Ash, and Freda Warrington as writers who tried hard to stay true to the original author in terms of style and spirit. I can still enjoy Peter Tremayne and Basil Copper who, despite falling short of the mark, can still spin an entertaining yarn. Consequently, I feel justified when I confine Myers to the lowest pit of literary Hell alongside Ian Holt and Richard Jaccoma for The Slave of Frankenstein, while a very different beast than Myers’ first effort, is equally contemptible.

The book begins thirty years after the events of The Cross of Frankenstein. Our dishonorable hero, Victor Saville found himself wanted for the murder of the detestable Mr. Greene shortly after the close of the first book. Wisely, Saville sought legal counsel and confessed a full account of the incredible events that transpired. Strangely, his legal counsel didn’t believe that self-defense when dealing with a murderous political revolutionary allied with the Frankenstein Monster would help his case so he advised his client to change his name and become an American citizen. The trick is that the new surname Victor chose was Frankenstein which rather defeats the purpose of going into hiding since any surviving members of the religious cult and private militia knew Saville to be Frankenstein’s son.

Sure enough, over the next thirty years, the Monster (yes, the Monster) sends him a series of harassing letters to his new home. Victor chooses to ignore these and considers his father’s creation to be nothing more than an irritating crank. You know I can’t think of a worse portrayal of Mary Shelley’s dignified and awesome literary character than turning him into a nineteenth century prank caller. The years have passed and Victor married, fathered a son and daughter (Victor and Victoria, naturally), became a widower and finally gets pissed off that the Monster is now threatening to do nasty things to Victoria (now a student at Oberlin College) so he decides at the ripe old age of 60 to journey to Virginia and kill his father’s other son once and for all. (Continue reading this post)

Sword and sorcery? Epic fantasy? Sword and planet? Sword and sandal? Does anyone really care about these delineations? Do they serve any purpose?

A couple of the blogs I frequent, Charles Gramlich’s Razored Zen and James Raggi’s Lamentations of the Flame Princess, have in recent days argued both sides of the debate. LOFP sneered that no one really cares about the issue and that all such divisions are meaningless; RZ’s opinion is clearly apparent in the fact that he’s written the first two parts of a detailed three-part series on heroic fantasy and its subdivisions.

So who is right? Here’s my take, for whatever that’s worth.

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